{photography} – Page 119

The panoramic towers of Prague

The Tower at Charles Bridge, Old Town.

More panoramas of Prague from 360 Cities by Jeffrey Martin, a photographer who’s made a speciality of capturing the city in 360º views. Among his collection are a number of photos taken from Prague’s many towers and steeples including a few where he’s managed to remove the supporting building, as in the view from the Charles Bridge above. This gives the effect of floating in weightless suspension above the city and may well induce alarm in vertigo sufferers. Needless to say, all these are best viewed on the full screen setting.

The Powder Tower (Prasna Brana).

Mikulas Tower.

Prague TV Tower Babies 1; one of David Cerný’s crawling baby sculptures looks over the city. See also the 18 gigapixel view from the tower.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The panoramas archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague

Weekend links 10

One of a number of vintage ads and ephemeral items at this Flickr set.

• From 1971: The Anthony Balch/William Burroughs/Jan Herman video experiment.

• The NYT reports on World on a Wire, a neglected science fiction drama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

• “While some of the technology industry’s brightest minds were inventing the first PCs and developing groundbreaking software, they were also feeding their heads with LSD.”

• The archive of author and illustrator Mervyn Peake has been acquired by the British Library for £410,000.

• Thames & Hudson are publishing I Wonder, a book by the wonderful Marian Bantjes, later in the year. Her site has a preview. I want.

• The gays: It’s election season in the UK so My Gay Vote looks at how the three main parties have supported LGB issues. (No data for the graphs, however.) Is theatre finally glad to be gay? Yet more Tumblrs: I heart skinny boys & Cute boys with cats.

• Trend-spotter, “svengali”, Situationist and the man who named the Sex Pistols: RIP Malcolm McLaren. The Guardian ran a number of memorial pages. Related: Anarchy in Gardenstown.

• Dublin’s One City, One Book choice for April 2010 is The Picture of Dorian Gray.

• The Catastrophist: Christopher Hitchens on JG Ballard.

• Steampunk Taxidermy by Lisa Black.

• LIFE looks back at Aleister Crowley.

• Groovy songs of the week: Julie Driscoll (with Brian Auger & The Trinity), a pair of songs by Bob Dylan—This Wheel’s On Fire—and Donovan—Season Of The Witch—and sets which look like a collaboration between Verner Panton and Marcel Duchamp. Amazing.

The recurrent pose 33

A double helping of that pose today. The photo above was a tip from commenter Jeremiah Q. Oxterwhiff and is credited on its Tumblr source as being by gay photographer Fred Holland Day (1864–1933). I can’t definitely confirm this but I’m fairly sure I’ve seen it credited to Day before. It’s also the case that another of the photographer’s pictures used the same pose and happens to be part of the first post in this series.

This depiction of Superman’s day off is by Worth1000 contributor jbuck43701 and was another tip from Evan Peterson. Thanks Evan!

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The recurrent pose archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Fred Holland Day

Storm Thorgerson: Right But Wrong

Storm Thorgerson, he of the great design partnership Hipgnosis, has some of his album covers and other work in exhibition this month at the Idea Generation Gallery, London. The exhibition runs to May 2nd. This Sunday (April 11th) he’ll be signing copies of his books at the gallery from 2pm.

Alongside some of the most iconic images from his seminal career, the exhibition will include previously unseen sculptures, sketches and writings from the artist. Right But Wrong will provide an in-depth account of the artist and the processes behind some of the artist’s most acclaimed works. Especially for Idea Generation Gallery, Storm will also present a number of brand new site-specific installations, including ambitious reinterpretations of a few his most renowned pieces. (More.)

Go 2 by XTC (1978).

News of the exhibition inspired the BBC news site to create a slideshow featuring Hipgnosis covers and examples of Thorgerson’s post-Hipgnosis work. Everyone invariably throws up a Pink Floyd cover when discussing Hipgnosis. Rather than do that, allow me to point you to XTC’s Go 2 album from 1978, the last word (so to speak) in self-referential album design.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Weekend links 9

Own a copy of Arthur #7 (October 2003) with my swirling cover pic featuring cosmic jazz maestro Sun Ra. Lots of good stuff inside, details here.

• Spinetingler Magazine announced their nominees the 2010 Spinetingler Award this week. Jeff VanderMeer’s Finch is one of the titles in the Best Novel category while my cover for Jeff’s book is in the Best Cover category.

• A Journey Round My Skull posted the results of the Raymond Roussel illustration contest. Entrants were asked to read Roussel’s story Bertha, The Child-Flower then create a picture based on that.

• Has Dottie got legs? The New Criterion on the poetry of Dorothy Parker.

• The gays: Fuck Yeah Hot Weird Guys, more from the Tumblr hall of mirrors; Simon Callow reviews Gay Icons Through the Ages by Tom Ambrose; Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art is open again with a new exhibition at a new location in Lambertville, NJ; some things never change: “Secret tape reveals Tory backing for ban on gays.”

• “Make the inaccessible exciting.” Colin Marshall interviews Chris Bohn, editor of music magazine The Wire.

• More music: Jon Savage’s brief history of Krautrock. The new Soul Jazz compilation, Deutsche Elektronische Musik, is released next week.

• Sage of the Apocalypse; Samuel R Delany’s Dhalgren comes to the stage in New York.

• Further Penguin fetishism: “Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain.”

• Yes, they’re out there, the Clients From Hell. For a palliative there’s Herbert W Kapitzki’s elegant poster designs from the 1960s.

• Song of the week: House of Glass (1967) by The Glass Family.